Five stars for you.
CatMan - some form on every server
Always here, there, and there again.
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Why not devote an entire issue to power customization and let the new content be pushed back? Then it's done.
Just my 2 cents.
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If it would only take one new issue to do, then I'm sure most people could live with that. However, in the past they've indicated that it would take much more time than it would take for one new issue, so much that three or four (or more!) issues of content would have to be set aside to work on Power Customization.
One issue would be worth it. A year or more's worth of issues is not.
Not to mention the amount of upkeep. Even if you devote one entire issue to it any problems found would probably require one entire issue for bug fixes in the future. As much as I would love to see power customization I would love even more to see the wonderful content they put out.
I'll admit up front that I haven't read the entire thread just a few of BaB's posts really.
I work in software development for a Graphics processing application. We develop a RIP (raster image processor) whose job is to process and print images. Involved in this is a color management layer. I have no real idea about how colors are calibrated on a game but I figured I'd toss this idea out in case it might trigger some chain of thinking on your part which might lead to an epiphany type moment.
In most CMS (color management system) implementations there is an option for "spot color replacement". What that does is it replaces a particular Spot color (and all it's tints) with another. Given this concept you would have to change the Power colors to be named spots rather than straight RGB. So rather than a color be defined as RGB 255,0,0 it would be something like [charname]_[powername]. Then as a costume component you could have a table outlining the color values for every power. EI: [charname]_[powername] = default,255,0,0
When a non default color value is found you go through the spot color replacement process when you paint that power. So everything that is colored by [charname]_[powername] gets replaced by the new color.
All this hinges on whether you have a CMS currently wired through the application at all.
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Weapon customization did open up some avenues of exploration and got us thinking more outside the box, but ultimately we found that specific pathway to be a dead end.
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If what i read here is correct, then every time its said that "we are nowhere closer to power cusomization than we were 3 years ago" is not true. In theory, you are closer, still not able to go far, but you can "just" (by just i mean not as bad as a full blown system) go ahead and make those code monkeys do some tools the continuing FX in the target know who actually generating that FX and inherit properties from there.
I know its no triviality, but my point is, you can expand on top of what you say you have discovered instead of fully creating a new system.
An additional question, though: Animations
We all know how Fly poses are "customizable" via emotes. You (i think) noted that you set those emotes to always take precedence over the standard fly animation. Does this means that, in theory, you can do the same for any power? Implementation aside (in how players would pick these animations to run) can you create an uppercut emote animation that i can use instead of a punch for Jab?
If it was available in slash command form, I can see how some one would be able to make a macro go /activatepower Jab&&Em Supapunch and trigger that instead of the direct jab button. I guess a right-click property can be added to powers to allow selection of allowable emotes for the commandshy, but as you said, that is implementation. It sounds possible, way more possible than FX customization.
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<QR>
Why not devote an entire issue to power customization and let the new content be pushed back? Then it's done.
Just my 2 cents.
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Question: How much time are you going to spend doing power customization for your toon(s) verse playing new powers or new content before you get bored again?
I don't know the dev time to develop new content verse create new powers verse create power customization.
Nevertheless:
If new content takes X
new powers takes 500X
new power customization takes 5000X
How do you build a return on investment to justify power customization?
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An additional question, though: Animations
We all know how Fly poses are "customizable" via emotes. You (i think) noted that you set those emotes to always take precedence over the standard fly animation. Does this means that, in theory, you can do the same for any power? Implementation aside (in how players would pick these animations to run) can you create an uppercut emote animation that i can use instead of a punch for Jab?
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Interestingly enough, one only has to consider the Aid Self "custom animations" people use with the emotes drink or eat, but even then, you still get the green aura from the effect itself. So, for melee attacks, it could work but you would still have the pink pom-poms for EM which would be a bone of contention for some (that whole 'never enough'//'grass = greener-over-there' concept). It would be interesting for blasts as well, since while the blast itself would remain unchanged, your character's hands could do a different movement. Some powers it would look silly for, admittedly (Xray Eyes with Energy Torrent's animation?), but you'd think some specific emotes could be built for them.
Lot of nit-picky animation work for the idea but it's a hell of a lot less intensive than the code reworks.
...
/macro PowerThrust "powexec_name Power Thrust$$em smack" <-- This seems like it would be amusing to me.
Blue: ~Knockback Squad on Guardian~
Red: ~Undoing of Virtue on [3 guesses]~
So what they're saying is that they don't WANT to try to keep up with Champions Online.
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So what they're saying is that they don't WANT to try to keep up with Champions Online.
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CoH is a running engine. All of the features people want out of CoH are possible, easily possible...for a new engine. So while yes, the devs could devote the anywhere from 6 to [edit, UBB boards don't like ASCII I guess] infinity months to make the necessary code reworks (barring some magical solution revealing itself), I'd be content with the emote theory (so it doesn't get buried in QR's....) brought up by Starsman above if it meant 1-3 months of work alongwith implementation of new content.
Blue: ~Knockback Squad on Guardian~
Red: ~Undoing of Virtue on [3 guesses]~
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Q: What is power customization?
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A: Good quesiton, depends on who you ask. Power Customization could mean:
SNIP
A: Technically, yes...they could. Still, I think we'd prefer to hold off on these particular powers until we can deal with being able to customize the whole powerset. Otherwise we could paint ourselves into a corner by making the elemental weapons customizeable and then not being able to make the rest of the power FX customizeable because of that.
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This is an excellent and well appreciated post on the nuts and bolts behind everyone's favorite topic. Thanks BaB for taking the time to lay out the particulars in making powers customizable, and the challenges.
53 Bots/FF/Mace Mastermind | 53 NRG/FF/Electricity Defender | 50 Time/Dual Pistols/Soul Defender | 50 Demons/FF/Mace Mastermind | 51 Necro/Dark/Soul Mastermind | 50 Thugs/Time/Mace Mastermind | 50 Ice/Ice/Arctic Tanker | 50 Plant/Rad/Earth Controller | 50 Illusion/Trick Arrow Controller | 50 Gravity/Force Field Controller
Yes, I like Force Fields.
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Weapon customization did open up some avenues of exploration and got us thinking more outside the box, but ultimately we found that specific pathway to be a dead end.
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If what i read here is correct, then every time its said that "we are nowhere closer to power cusomization than we were 3 years ago" is not true. In theory, you are closer, still not able to go far, but you can "just" (by just i mean not as bad as a full blown system) go ahead and make those code monkeys do some tools the continuing FX in the target know who actually generating that FX and inherit properties from there.
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How in the world are you reading "we found that specific pathway to be a dead end" to mean that Weapon Customization has brought them closer?
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Please note, however, that "City of Heroes 2" is already on its way. Except that it's called "Champions Online," which is supposed to have power customization right out the door.
Yes, yes, yes, I know that there's really no guarentee that CO is going to happen. And some have said that there's no guarentee that it will have customization. But to me, it would be foolish, foolish, FOOLISH for CO to hit the market without it. Power Customization has to be one of the most requested (if not the most requested) QoL feature.
[/ QUOTE ]"Your powers, on your terms: There are a multitude of astonishing powers to choose from in Champions Online, and its flexible character creation system gives you total control over your hero's abilities. You can even pick the appearance of your powers. Do you want purple force fields? Green fire blasts? Jet black claws? In Champions Online, you decide!"
- http://www.champions-online.com/game_features
It'll be in there.
Virtue: The-Invictus (Blue)
The Emissary of Justice - Level 50 Fire/Fire Blaster
The Emissary of Justice. - Level 50 WP/Fire Tanker
Mesmerius - Level 50 Psi/Mental Blaster
Nucleoa - Level 50 Rad/Son Defender
it's still bs, no matter how much explanation there is. FX aren't stored on the char? Fine. You know what is? Power selection. You can expand existing sets with identical, redundant powers, that call different colored power FX, and then let someone respec into blue or red. Obviously you have contingent powers and powers restricted by other powers figured out. At the very least you could take the red lightning and blue lightning or the red energy bolts and blue energy bolts and give everyone a choice. There's nothing about your system that makes that impossible.
Plus, considering how much we hear, 2nd hand, about how messed up your pipeline is, maybe the solution is to get a coder to do some kind of text-parsing thing that can write the files for you, so you can keep different instances of identical powers synched up. The fact that PPs use original MoG is already goofy and a problem you should have addressed for the sake of making things easier for you to maintain. Continuously updating powers and new powersets was always part of the plan, so why try to keep doing it through this seemingly unweildy scheme? FFS. Mid's hero designer can store info and then spew it out in the correct format for a forum post--presumably you could make a utility that lets you make several colors within a powerset, and lets you change their vital stats together, then pumps out the necessary files.
This seems to be the key to the whole thing, right here:
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What it can't do, is play effects on anyone else. The powers system determines if a power hits or not. There's no way for something on your player model to know that you've actually hit anything...no bits for it to inherit and trigger the right animation (hit anim bits play on the target)...no way to know where to put the FX if it could be triggered. Same thing with continuing effects. The power system keeps track of when the attributes are true or not, whether or not to play the continuing effect, what effects script to play, and what to play it on...you, the enemy, a bunch of enemies, your team...whatever. That information doesn't go to the player. So attack effects and activation effects...we could do similar to custom weapons. But hit effects and continuing effects, we can't.
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Because if I'm correct in what I'm understanding, you're quasi-confident you could use similar "invisible weapon" methodology that you used for WC to allow me to shoot a green & white fireball toward a Bone Daddy or something, but once the animation for fireball started on the Bone Daddy, it would be red and yellow (default colors). And, subsequently, any DoT to the Bone Daddy (when his abdomen is on fire) would remain red and yellow, because those are the default values you've had in place. This is all because the animations for fireball exploding and the DoT (gut on fire) never reference the variables from the player that contain the customized colors (green and white, in my case)?
Is there no way to scotch-tape some values about colors into the power system, so that when the Bone Daddy calls the hit-by-fireball animation, it pulls the custom colors along with the damage (or other) values? Because, obviously the powers system should be grabbing values from the player about damage enhancement values, etc....
What about creating another parameter in the power system (set to TRUE or FALSE) that indicates the player character that is executing the power on the enemy has assigned custom color values for that power...and then having the animation check that boolean value -- if its true, then check the character's costume attributes to see what those colors are, if not than don't check.
I dunno, I'm sure I'm oversimplifying things. Logically it feels like it should make sense. Logistically it might be too big of a project with the current infrastructure. What about just trying one power set at a time, BaB? Like Energy Blast primary for blasters. That way its not such a huge undertaking.
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How in the world are you reading "we found that specific pathway to be a dead end" to mean that Weapon Customization has brought them closer?
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Because once you find a dead end, you build a road that starts there, while otherwise you had to build a full road from the start.
Before, the devs thought a full system had to be developed to inherit all the things BaB noted are now possible, that step is out of the way now. They still have other things to tackle from that point, but this is one less thing to do.
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Because if I'm correct in what I'm understanding, you're quasi-confident you could use similar "invisible weapon" methodology that you used for WC to allow me to shoot a green & white fireball toward a Bone Daddy or something, but once the animation for fireball started on the Bone Daddy, it would be red and yellow (default colors). And, subsequently, any DoT to the Bone Daddy (when his abdomen is on fire) would remain red and yellow, because those are the default values you've had in place. This is all because the animations for fireball exploding and the DoT (gut on fire) never reference the variables from the player that contain the customized colors (green and white, in my case)?
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If I read this right it can go further, IF the devs attached the dot fire color to the same node as the projectile, not only will it not be inherited in the target once you affect him with a DoT, but every time YOU are in the receiving end you will inherit your own tinting. So anyone that shoot fire at you and caused DoT will make you green fire too.
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What about creating another parameter in the power system (set to TRUE or FALSE) that indicates the player character that is executing the power on the enemy has assigned custom color values for that power...and then having the animation check that boolean value -- if its true, then check the character's costume attributes to see what those colors are, if not than don't check.
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That is far from what can be done. The thing is, as far as i know, that the animated entity running on the target as consequence of your action has no knowledge of your existence at all. It does not know the fire was spit by you, it just know it must animate fire on the target. It would be able to inherit colors from the target but not from the entity that set off the fire.
I figure that some work (maybe a lot) from the code monkeys would be able to allow the animation aware of the originator, the power system does keep partial track of this to avoid stacking certain effects from the same source, so it shouldn't be impossible to extend to the animation, I just guess in the safe side that it will be a lot of code.
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One year from today's date I'd much rather be playing a game with more to do than a game that looks pretty.
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One year from today's date I'd really like to be playing a game that allows me to play my character's actual concept, rather than trying to shoe-horn it into the currently very limited power choices with their set-in-stone animations and/or color schemes.
"OK, first of all... Shut Up." - My 13-Year-Old Daughter
29973 "The Running of the Bulls" [SFMA] - WINNER of the Mighty Big Story Arc Contest !
- The Stellar Wind Orbital Space Platform
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Is there no way to scotch-tape some values about colors into the power system, so that when the Bone Daddy calls the hit-by-fireball animation, it pulls the custom colors along with the damage (or other) values? Because, obviously the powers system should be grabbing values from the player about damage enhancement values, etc....
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BaB didn't come right out and say this, so I will. BaB is giving players a peek into the mechanics of the animation system, in terms of what it does, and how he uses what it does to make things work. Take for example the issue of customized weapons. BaB is saying that the way they made custom weapons work is by eliminating the weapon from the attack animations and adding them as costume items. In effect, they leveraged already existing abilities of the game animation system in an originally unintended way to make them work.
Notice what BaB *isn't* saying. He isn't saying that they added code to make custom weapons "work." And I don't think they did. Because code changes to the actual animation engine are massively more difficult than anything BaB has described in terms of all of their current customization efforts. Or rather, I should say massively more difficult for BaB. Because he's not a programmer, and therefore cannot make any such changes at all. For BaB, there is the difficult (i.e. leveraging the various animation capabilities of the engine to perform certain sequences of actions), the time-consuming (changing the definitions of all the powers effects to some new thing that uses a different system, assuming some different system was implemented), and the impossible (altering the behavior of the animation engine).
At the moment, my guess is that much as right now there isn't a lot of extra resources available to make powers, separate from Castle, there isn't a lot of resources available to make code changes to the animation engine. So even if BaB wanted to pursue powers customization options on his own initiative, the only options available to him are ones that do not involve altering the way the game processes animations. He can attempt to use them in different ways, but the moment anyone says "all it would take is to add a flag that..." or "is there a way to take this information, and insert it over here..." they are already beyond the limits of what's currently possible for the dev team at the moment.
[Guide to Defense] [Scrapper Secondaries Comparison] [Archetype Popularity Analysis]
In one little corner of the universe, there's nothing more irritating than a misfile...
(Please support the best webcomic about a cosmic universal realignment by impaired angelic interference resulting in identity crisis angst. Or I release the pigmy water thieves.)
I am willing to wait as long as it takes for it to be done, because I will squee and squee very loudly when my energy blaster's blue blasts can be matched with blue pom-poms, or my Forcefield defender's bubbles can be a nice blue color rather than the teal they are now so they too match the blue blasts.
And I know the bubbles can be blue! There was a bug ages ago during Test, when they were changing the 2nd Upgrade power for MM's to not be nuke recharge time! The bug hit and everyone LOVED the dark blue it was :3
A hearbreaker when it was fixed.
Still. Power Customization is something I want, and I am willing to wait for it like a patient dog waiting for his master to come home. I may one day become like Fry's dog, but I'll still wait.
I sit in my zen of not being able to do anything right while simultaniously not being able to do anything wrong. Om. -CuppaJo
It is by caffeine alone that I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning. It is by caffeine alone that I set my mind in motion.
You know its funny you bring this up.....i noticed some of the power effects can be easily overridden by other power effects...what i mean is for example...
On super speed...i can overright the graphic efefct with the darkness cloud power from darkness power set....the effect changes to a white color with the darkness just beyond...in addition using the prestige powerr slide...the pink over rides that orange from super speed...allowing em to slide around in a pink format......i also found that the costume effects of auras overright the power efefcts too...like i decided to change my fists ona character to have a pink color burning effect....this makes me able to ignore the typical orange color from hasten.
Soooo...anywise.....thought i might bring that up....becasue if it where me i would just make more aura modules that get called or change the current ones.
I also might bring up the niffty effect that some unscrupoulous players for a while where using to eliminate some the graphic frames in the some of the powers to make their powers go alot quicker in pvp and in the normal game...but i am sure you already know about that....and i am sure you already know about other players changing their graphic palletes altogether to get differing power looking effects...especially with the demo record option and such....
In fact on you tube their used to be a video of someone using green flame and another one with a person using blue effects instead of the normal energy red ones....
So anywise...thats a great bit of information....on how the powers work....and about the customization....
I assume their is some huge plan being created to make the system entirely customizable...other wise you would not be posting this stuff...
I mean the big list itself....WOW!...that is a fairly huge task to tackle.....the coloring and such will be simple....but some of that.....I take my hat off to your team if that what they are trying to tackle.
I can forsee some of the lag issues and alot of other issues you have not even covered that would have to be tackled...the stuff you mentioned is easy in comparison to the other things.
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Q: What is power customization?
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<SNIP A LOT OF BAD NEWS>
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Q: What about the hammer from Stone Melee, or the swords for Ice Melee and Fire Melee? Could those be made into custom weapons too?
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A: Technically, yes...they could. Still, I think we'd prefer to hold off on these particular powers until we can deal with being able to customize the whole powerset. Otherwise we could paint ourselves into a corner by making the elemental weapons customizeable and then not being able to make the rest of the power FX customizeable because of that.
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This post is long and it tells me things I wish not to hear.
Hack the Gibson, Brawler. You and Castle just need to hack the hell outta that Gibson.
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You can expand existing sets with identical, redundant powers, that call different colored power FX, and then let someone respec into blue or red. Obviously you have contingent powers and powers restricted by other powers figured out.
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Except for.
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A: Duplicating powers and PFX in that way makes it very difficult to maintain those powers. We did this for the prestige sprints and it certainly can work, but if we were to do that for every player power then that's a huge amount of duplicate data just to have the visuals changed. The likelihood of bugs related to powers would increase exponentially. Every time Castle would go in to fix a bug with Flares, he'd have to fix that bug for every 'color' version of Flares.
Its also a ton more work than being able to just take the current FX/particle scripts, dupe them one time, and set them to a common tint-able ready color. If we had to manually tint variants for every FX script then its a ridiculous amount of work.
It's also limiting the options for players. What if the shade of yellow we pick isn't the exact shade of yellow-orange, or yellow-green that you were really hoping for. Even sticking to Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue, Green, Violet, White, and Black would be duplicating the power defs for every player power 8 times. And would you guys really be happy with such a limited set of options?
So, its a ton more work for us, exponentially more upkeep problems for Castle, and less options for you guys. Not going to do this
even if it does work.
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Dawncaller - The Circle of Dawn
Too many blasted alts to list, but all on Virtue.
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I'll admit up front that I haven't read the entire thread just a few of BaB's posts really.
I work in software development for a Graphics processing application. We develop a RIP (raster image processor) whose job is to process and print images. Involved in this is a color management layer. I have no real idea about how colors are calibrated on a game but I figured I'd toss this idea out in case it might trigger some chain of thinking on your part which might lead to an epiphany type moment.
In most CMS (color management system) implementations there is an option for "spot color replacement". What that does is it replaces a particular Spot color (and all it's tints) with another. Given this concept you would have to change the Power colors to be named spots rather than straight RGB. So rather than a color be defined as RGB 255,0,0 it would be something like [charname]_[powername]. Then as a costume component you could have a table outlining the color values for every power. EI: [charname]_[powername] = default,255,0,0
When a non default color value is found you go through the spot color replacement process when you paint that power. So everything that is colored by [charname]_[powername] gets replaced by the new color.
All this hinges on whether you have a CMS currently wired through the application at all.
[/ QUOTE ]I don't pretend to know exactly what you're talking about, but the concept sounds a lot like a vertex or pixel shader, which (I assume, without knowing their code and thought processes) would be the first place they went when thinking of how to implement power customization, or at least color changing.
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/36641/My-Little-Exalt
Then there is the problem or once this is all working, the unintended side effects like multiple stacked effects.
Consider if multiple FF bubblers with different color bubbles. If they stacked their bubbles on you, you might not be able to see out or at least not very well.
A Red, Green, and Blue Bubble would either block your vision (a black bubble), give you a dirty brown bubble or strobe colors until people are having epileptic fits. (Actually I kind of like the combining colors idea certainly unique but I can hear the crys already)
This isn't just for bubbles. All continueing effects have to stack their colors so it just makes things even more complicated no matter how you look at it.
Buy more memory.
----------------------------
You can't please everyone, so lets concentrate on me.
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Why not devote an entire issue to power customization and let the new content be pushed back? Then it's done.
Just my 2 cents.